Written by John Ainsworth, founder and CEO of Make Sport Fun, marketing to engage inactive people.
Would you like to know how to engage hundreds of disabled people in your activities?
In this post we’re going to tell you how to do just that.
But let me start at the beginning.
The Creating Connections programme was started in West Yorkshire to help inactive disabled people become more active.
Over the first two years the Creating Connections programme engaged 282 disabled people through their behaviour change intervention (and many more through their wider interventions).
- 70% of people were inactive at sign up.
The programme has been effective at recruiting inactive disabled people with 70% of participants self-reporting 0 days active on the baseline single item measure question.
It’s also been effective at getting people more active.
- 70% of participants were more active at the six-month follow up point!
These results are amazing. James Brown, Phil Truby and the rest of the team at Yorkshire Sport Foundation are doing an absolutely incredible job. They are intelligent, hard-working and good looking. But these results are extraordinary, so how are they doing it?
To achieve this they use a behaviour change intervention based on the Let’s Get Moving physical activity care pathway. Let’s Get Moving was originally designed by the Department of Health and is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for increasing physical activity levels.
I’ll explain more about how this intervention works later on.
So if this project is so amazing then what was the problem?
The problem was that the three officers working in the project were spending about half their time working with partners (e.g. physios, hospitals) to get disabled people referred on to the programme.
This meant they were spending about £40,000 a year on engagement. That’s not what these staff members were supposed to be doing. They were trained in behaviour change – they were supposed to be spending their time on that.
They were spending £40,000 a year on engagement.
Phil Truby came on our free online workshop, and was intrigued about the power of Facebook Ads. So James and Phil asked us to run a Facebook Ad campaign to engage disabled people directly.
We want to try new things. I think the sector as a whole needs to try new ways of interacting and engaging with people.
In four months, our team at Make Sport Fun engaged 170 disabled people for the programme.
There have been over 170 enquiries in four months!
Later I’ll show you a video of James and Phil from Yorkshire Sport Foundation explaining why they decided to try out Facebook Ads.
Today we’re sharing exactly how it was done, including…
• Offer
• Ad campaigns
• Targeting
• Budget
• Landing page
Let’s get into it.
Make an Offer
As a physical activity service, it’s always best to intrigue people and get them through your door with an awesome offer.
So, to catch the attention of our client’s target audience when scrolling through their newsfeeds, we promoted the great offer from Yorkshire Sport Foundation:
Free support for disabled people with finding the ideal activity for them, and helping them to get started
What’s great about Facebook advertising is that you can constantly optimize your campaign to generate the best results.
In this case, we were able to optimise each campaign by testing it with different audiences and seeing where it got the highest results.
We had split the audience of disabled people into people with:
• Mental health conditions
• Physical impairments
• Sensory impairments
• Autism or Asperger’s
• Learning disabilities
For example, in the mental health campaign we ran a few versions of ads – one focused on adults, and one on parents.
Within the first two weeks the mental health campaign aimed at adults engaged 57 people.
But there were only 1 lead for the advert aimed at parents.
So we adjusted the campaign to put all of the budget into the adult campaign which was working and paused parent campaign.
When you’re initially deciding on an offer to invest in for Facebook advertising, choose a promotion that’s already been proven to work for you outside of your paid efforts.
A free class or free support with finding the ideal activity tend to do really well. Then, once the offer is decided on, it’s time to create the ad campaign.
We’ll get into building the Facebook ads in just a second. Let’s first address a question that’s always heavy on physical activity provider’s minds…
Why not Leaflets?
Why is it so beneficial to promote these health and fitness offers through Facebook rather than using leaflets?
3 big reasons:
1. You can get good results from leaflets if you hand them out in person, but it’s very time-consuming to do so.
2. It’s not very effective to promote with leaflets via a door drop or leaving them in high traffic locations. They do get results, but not huge ones.
3. Leaflets don’t allow you to target your audience as effectively as Facebook does (based on gender, age, location and interests).
I feel that we spend a lot of money and a lot of time developing leaflet advertising. Actually, Facebook Advertising is the way forward. So many people have Facebook. It seems like a much more sensible way of marketing.
Read the full case study to learn how the advertisement was built, audience targeted and budget set.